Integrated production, sampling quality control and maintenance of deteriorating production systems with AOQL constraint

This paper considers the problem of integrated production, preventive maintenance and quality control for a stochastic production system subject to both reliability and quality deteriorations. A make-to-stock production strategy is used to provide protection to the serviceable stock against uncertainties. The quality control is performed using a single acceptance sampling plan by attributes. The preventive maintenance strategy consists in carrying out an imperfect maintenance as a part of the setup activity at the beginning of each lot production, while a major maintenance (overhaul) is undertaken once the proportion of defectives in a rejected lot reaches or exceeds a given threshold. The main objective of this study is to jointly optimize the production lot size, the inventory threshold, the sampling plan parameters and the overhaul threshold by minimizing the total incurred cost. To meet customer requirements, the optimization problem is subject to a specified constraint on the average outgoing quality limit (AOQL). A stochastic mathematical model is developed and solved using a simulation-based optimization approach. Numerical examples and thorough sensitivity analyses are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed integrated model. Compared with the 100% inspection policy which is widely used in the literature on integrated production, maintenance and quality control, the results obtained show that an economic design of acceptance sampling in such an integrated context can lead to important cost savings of more than 20%. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.